Tuesday, April 24, 2018

The most depressing coda on Travis Reinking— the Waffle
House shooter— comes to us from James Freeman of the Wall Street Journal. To
Freeman, it was:

... another
story involving years of red flags on mental health that did not result in
necessary treatment.

Ought we not to ask ourselves what our licensed credentialed
mental health professionals are doing with their time? If something in the
culture prevents them from doing a good job, we ought to know about it. At a time when
psychiatry possesses a veritable pharmacopeia to treat mental illness, why did
its practitioners fail to treat Travis Reinking?

Mr.
Reinking had an extensive history of mental issues, according to law
enforcement in Tennessee and the Illinois county where he lived before moving
to the Nashville area.

Federal
and local law-enforcement agents said Mr. Reinking was arrested near the White
House grounds last July, after entering a restricted area in hopes of getting
an appointment with the president and refusing to leave. He said that he was a
“sovereign citizen” and had a right to inspect the grounds, court records show.

And also,

In May
2016, he was convinced that singer Taylor Swift was stalking him and hacking
his phone, and that his family was in on it, according to reports from the
sheriff’s office in Tazewell County, obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

His
family informed officials that he’d been having such delusions since 2014,
according to the reports. Ms. Swift’s publicist didn’t respond to a request for
comment.

When
sheriff’s deputies in Illinois tried to get him to a nearby hospital for
evaluation, Mr. Reinking resisted until he was told that he didn’t have a
choice.

A
spokesman for the Nashville Metropolitan Police Department said it was unclear
if he was diagnosed with a mental illness.

And there were the auditory hallucinations:

In
August, Mr. Reinking approached the sheriff’s office, saying he believed 20 to
30 people were tapping his phone and that he was hearing people “outside his
residence barking like dogs,” according to the report from August 2017.

2 comments:

In our present world of ignoring reality, what would it take for a self-professed mentally ill man to be treated appropriately? The two conditions are self-cancelling and the result is a continuation of the trend, ending in disaster.